Mobile Orchard

Most Android phones have a search button. this button is used to search contacts,applications or anything on the phone. We can make use of the search functionality in our apps. In this post we’re going to see how to implement search functionality to search for entries stored in a databaseand display them in a ListView. [...]

In the last post we saw how to use Android services to do time consuming operations in the background. in this post we will see how can a client application call the methods of a service defined in another application. this is achieved through Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL). AIDL is a java like language [...]

Android Service is used for long-running processes that do not require user interaction, such as calling a web service and parsing response. Or processes that need to be running even if the application that started the service is not on the foreground such as playing mp3 files in a music player. we need to distinguish [...]

In a previous last post we saw how to call REST and SOAP web services. The web service reponse can be one of the following: XML. SOAP. JSON. Parsing XML Android offers three types of XML parsers: DOM Parser. Pull Parser. SAX Parser. we’ll demonstrate each using the following xml example: <?xml version=”1.0″?> <person> <firstname>Jack</firstname> [...]

One of the most common functionalities required in mobile applications is to call a web service to retrieve data. This process involves requesting the web service with parameters, receiving the response and parsing it to obtain data. Today the most common web services types are SOAP and REST. Android does not provide a built in SOAP client, [...]

We saw before that we can persist an application’s data using SQLite database. Android offers another way to store user’s data through using preferences. Android preferences is a key/value entries that store data that can be specific to a certain activity or shared among all activities within the application. the data are stored in a [...]

In the previous post we saw one way to deal with threads in Android, which is by using Handlers. In this post we’ll see how to use another technique which is using AsyncTask class. AsyncTask is an abstract class that provides several methods managing the interaction between the UI thread and the background thread. it’s [...]

Multi-Threading concept is essential in most platforms. it provides maximum utilization of the processor. threading is used when the program executes time consuming processes (such as calling a web service) and to give a good user experience by unblocking the UI. Android provides threading techniques to perform time consuming tasks in a background thread with coordination with the [...]